The finance ministry has offered only a 12% increase in the budgetary support to the central plan for the coming fiscal against the Planning Commission's demand for an 18% hike. The plan panel sought higher support, citing increased requirement for the flagship schemes, particularly MGNREGA, or Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act . The North Block, constrained by its compulsion to return to fiscal consolidation and additional expenditure due...
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Price volatility & food crises by Jacques Diouf
The present situation is different from that of 2007-2008, although recent climatic events may significantly reduce agricultural production next season. Must history always repeat itself? We are indeed on the verge of what could turn out to be another major food crisis. The FAO Food Price Index at the end of 2010 returned to its highest level. Drought in Russia and the export restrictions adopted by the government, together with...
More »NREGS could see a 60% increase in its outlay by Jyoti Mukul
The government’s biggest welfare programme could see an almost 60 per cent increase in funding. The forthcoming Budget is likely to make a provision of Rs 64,000 crore for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in 2011-12, against Rs 40,100 crore in the current fiscal. The huge increase in outlay will be mainly on account of two factors: Linking wages under the scheme with the consumer price...
More »Maximum Dithering for Minimum Wages!
Even though the Central Government agreed to link the wages paid under MG-NREGA to the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labourers (CPIAL), it shied away from paying statutory minimum wages in various states of India. Their logic for this: Lack of clarity on who will bear the extra financial burden—the Centre or the states? A letter from the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to UPA and NAC Chairperson Sonia Gandhi dated 31...
More »Saxena panel trashes tribal welfare schemes
NC Saxena , the influential former bureaucrat who is a member of the National Advisory Council, has raised the ineffectiveness of government programmes among tribal people in a paper that will come up for discussion before the Sonia-Gandhi headed council. The government relied on a report by Saxena last year in denying clearance to a large mining project by Vedanta Resources in Orissa’s Niyamgiri hills . This had attracted international...
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